May I speak plainly?...If you'll forgive me, he's common!...He's like an animal. He has an animal's habits. There's even something subhuman about him. Thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is! Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the Stone Age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you - you here waiting for him. Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you, that's if kisses have been discovered yet. His poker night you call it. This party of apes! Blanche, A Streetcar Named Desire

I’m sitting outside of my beehives, watching the girls at work. A couple of foragers from the Italian hive fly around my head to check me out.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

They whisper in my ear. One diminutive Italian, the size of my pinky fingernail, lands on my sleeve, all sleek and gold and shiny and fat. She and I hang out, enjoying the sunshine.

This beautiful zen moment is shattered by what sounds like a buzz saw coming straight at me.

BUZZ.
BUZZ.
BUZZ. BUZZ.

It’s the sound of an old World War I fighter plane that’s spewing and sputtering black smoke and looking for a dog fight.

BUZZZZZZ.

And I cringe and wait for what I’m sure will be the sting from some unimaginably gigantic killer bee that’s flown up here to New Mexico from Africa looking for easy pickings in the form of first-year beekeepers.

But instead, there’s this baby elephant sized bee BUZZing right at eye level, taking up twice the space the little forager who has just launched herself from my shirt sleeve does. I’m staring into two great big shining eyes on the top of a big lug head. At long, gangly legs hanging down limp beneath a glistening body that makes this specimen the Percheron, no, the Clydesdale of honeybees, and then I realize what this is.

A drone.

“Drones are a biological imperative for a colony of Honey Bees. Drones are the means to keep alive that genetic component of the queen laying the unfertilized egg to share with virgins as they venture into a Drone Congregation Area (DCA).”

For us non-biologists, that’s a boy bee. This is one of the big guys the girls keep around for one thing and one thing only: sex.

As Stanley Kowalski likes to say, “having them colored lights goin'…”

Drones live, as I understand it, a life of relative leisure in the hive, where they hang out in their recliners, drink beer, and are fed and tended by the female worker bees. But with the last few very cold nights we’ve had, bordering on bitter, actually, and the fact that a lot of the flowers are done for pollen, and not to mention that drones are a dime a dozen (easy to raise, that is, when they are needed), this drone is doomed.

Doomed.

I wonder if he knows that yet.

He BUZZes to the front porch of the Italian hive, where he is immediately escorted off by a score of petite lady wrestler bees in yellow and black spandex. The air rips with more BUZZ BUZZ BUZZing, and two more drones are trying to fight their way back into the hive, flexing their muscles beneath their sleek muscle shirts. One succeeds, slipping in covertly. One does not. After a lengthy tussle, he is dumped unceremoniously off of the front porch of the hive.

He looks rather surprised.

I'm feeling real sorry for him and imagine him screaming “Hey, Stell - Laaahhhhh!” But instead there’s just a plaintive … buzz. No chest pounding going on here.

The drones are now pouring out of the hive. I’m not even exactly sure what it is I’m seeing, and I have to consult the bee tomes afterward to make sure I’m guessing right about the drones being evicted.

Which I am.

Guess those old boys are going to miss football season.

Good night, Stanley.